Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Aspect in Choosing a Cage1258679
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you consider? Color? Cost? An attractive design? People select their cages primarily based upon many different criteria. However, there is 1 very essential aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked aspect in selecting a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Sure, people might believe they look at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the number of small, "standard" pet shop cages nonetheless becoming bought each year, it is clear that individuals do not truly look at cage size.
Let's do a small thought experiment. The typical guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The average height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An average pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size space for you would be roughly eight-ft by 12-feet - the size of a big bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your entire life in a big bathroom or small bedroom may not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of exercise in a space that little.
An additional associated factor that I am convinced that people do not think about when sizing a cage are the extra accessories that your pig requires - such as a nest box, a meals dish and a hay rack.
So let's return to our hypothetical equivalent space. When we add a nest box to our pig's cage, we are adding an item that is maybe 10 to 12-inches on every side. That might be equivalent to building a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting it our hypothetical equivalent room with us.
Add a meals dish to your pig's cage (about half the size of your pig) and it is like throwing a kiddie pool - three-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our room.
Of course we're going to need a water bottle. This would be roughly equivalent to something the size of a hot water heater standing in the corner of our equivalent room.
A hay rack is has a footprint of roughly four by seven inches. So adding a hay rack to the wall may be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against one of the walls in our hypothetical equivalent space and placing them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of space? Does it sound like someplace you would like to invest the rest of your life? Let us evaluation.
We begin by moving into an eight x 12 room - an area roughly the size of a big bathroom or a little bedroom. Subsequent we place up a 7x7 storage shed in the corner. This leaves us with an eight-foot by 5-foot space in front of the shed and a useless one-foot by seven-foot narrow strip along the side of the shed.
Then, to make matters worse, we place a three-foot wading pool, a water heater and two nightstands in our remaining 8x5 living space. What does this leave us with? We are left with a extremely little and cramped region in which to live. And, worst of all, our health starts to endure because exercise becomes a nearly impossible job.
